The One- way Street: Part II

(Story of a man who left)
There never is a story of one man alone.There is a family gathered for dinner around a few meager plates, there are friends and beer glasses and the bar man across the counter,there is a sister who has long grown out of pillow fights. And in Franz's story 700 miles further north there was a young woman.

If Maria loved anything rather more than her fiance it was her homeland. For her that was where life was meant to be. So when Franz left in search of a new world, on board a modest vessel, with a cheap passage which meant he had to work his way through the voyage, Maria was in a struggle of a different sort. In the end she realised she could not choose between the two and set out on the same road herself, resolving to bring back the man she loved to the land she loved.I am rather more in awe for Maria. Over eighty years ago, for a young woman to undertake such a journey, required something more than ordinary will.

But Maria never came back.We should assume that she was unable to persuade her fiance. It could even be that they could not afford a passage back. In any case Franz and Maria were married in Santa Catarina. The land that they were supposed to turn into gold, turned out to be a lush green patch of rain forest. In the middle of which Franz made a wooden cabin with his own hands and they began to live. The couple had seven children- five girls and three boys. Eventually they had to sell their land to move out to the nearby town Taió, for they needed a church and a school to send the children to.

While the real number of German immigrants in Brazil is less in comparison to those of other nationalities, in the Southern states like Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina they formed a visible presence. Franz and Maria were among the 75801 Germans whom the official records say arrived in Brazil in the 1920s. The descendants of the German immigrants preserved, rather fiercly, their language and traditions. In Taió, one still comes across the same folk dances that we witnessed at the Hofbräuhaus at Munich. Songs are sung at Christmas gatherings,their meaning long lost in the web of time. Now, four generations later the children of the first immigrants often stoutly refuse to follow these traditions, parting way with their conservative families and asserting their identity as Brazilians.

Franz, however was determined to have a new life, albeit one of long years of struggle. He gave away the sir name that he so loathed to become Franz Mainhardt.He started a modest carpenter's shop in Taió and built a new house, this time one with proper windows and doors. However, integration was no easy matter. Between 1937 to 1945, a 'campaign of nationalisation' was run by the Brazilian government.The campaign that often achieved dictatorial dimensions focussed on forcible assimilation of the diverse population of Brazil into a unitary mould. Portuguese, once the language of the colonizer was expected to be spoken by everyone who considered himself/ herself a Brazilian. Franz's half formed Portuguese was considered a defiance by the state and he was among the many immigrants who were tortured for their 'slips of tongue'. Years went on..

Franz's children, while they went to the nearby German school,like their father learned Portuguese too.Later on,the three boys took up business. Gertrudes worked as a house keeper and is now in a trade of making and selling clothes. Agnes is a nun and has spent a good part of her life in Tanzania.Inês and Irmgardt went on to become teachers and have moved to Florianopolis

And what about Maria? For Maria Brazil was never home.In the nights she dreamed of woods of pine and oak and during days the tropical sun continued to hurt her eyes. Maria stoutly refused to learn Portuguse. Her children spoke to her in German.I hear that in later years Maria had chances to go back and vist her family and Heimat(home land). Their situation had improved and her relatives wished that she came. But Maria refused to go with the same stubbornness that made her cross the Atlantic once so many years back.For, despite her home, her husband and seven children, she knew if she set her eyes upon her homeland once more, she would never go back.
(cont..)